Slightly crazy start to the week so I’ll just go with some leftover reviews I didn’t get to Saturday.VALERIAN: The New Future Trilogy by Jean-Claude Mezieres, and Pierre Christin collects three chapters from a long-running French SF comic strip about two time-and-space travelers, Valerian and Laureline, adapting to a new status quo as adventurers-for-hire now that their long-time base in the future has been wiped out. Readable, but I didn’t feel the magic.
I felt even less magic with LOCKE AND KEY: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, in which a family reeling after one of Dad’s psychiatric patients kills him moves into the old family home in the town of Lovecraft. Guess what? There are supernatural forces in the house and the killer’s tracked the family down! This fell flat for me, though I’ve been told it improves later on. So I may give it another try, but maybe not.SUPERMAN/BATMAN: The Search for Kryptonite by Michael Green, Mike Johnson and Shane Davis has Superman discover there’s so much green kryptonite fallen on Earth, a movie company can afford real meteor rocks instead of props. Together, the World’s Finest Team set out to gather every last chunk, which brings them into conflict with Amana Waller and Lana Lang (who was running Lexcorps at the time). Good premise, but both Lana and Waller act more villainous than I can swallow (Waller’s a hard-case but she’s not this crazy.NEVERLAND by Joe Brusha and Jean-Paul Deshong reminds me a lot of the last half-season of Once Upon a Time, in presenting Pan as a malevolent boy in a man’s body willing to kill to feed his immortality. When Wendy Darling discovers her nephews John and Michael have been kidnapped to Neverland, she heads off with a one-handed man who claims to have been imprisoned there … There are a couple of little problems in this (Pan refers to a history with Wendy but never explains it—and it’s clearly not the canonical one), but a bigger one I think is that Pan isn’t very distinctive. He could be any evil overlord and I’ve seen way too many of them.HELLBOY: Conqueror Worm by Mike Mignola (cover by Mignola, rights with current holder) was my first exposure to the series and a completely baffling one. Nazi cyborg heads, a homonculus, Rasputin, aliens, Nazis, the Lobster … it made absolutely no sense to someone starting from scratch. After I read Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil, it worked a lot better and I became a fan. Hellboy and Roger are sent to investigate a mysterious Nazi rocket descending from space toward a former fortress and discover another Nazi occult scheme, plus Hellboy’s old foe the disembodied Nazi head von Klempt. A big turning point for the series, as Hellboy splits from the BPRD after discovering how little some of the current management trust the weirder agents; very good in its own right, but not a good one to start reading with. It has, of course, been added to the chronology.